[gwern]

My understanding was that Autoresearch was defined as training from scratch (since it's based on the nanogpt speedrun), not using any pretrained models. So it couldn't do anything like upcycling a pretrained model or the Frankenmerge, because it's not given any access to such a thing in the first place. (If it could, the speedrun would be pointless as it would mostly benchmark what is the fastest fileserver you can download a highly compressed pretrained model checkpoint from...) It can increase the number of layers for a new architecture+run, but that's not the same thing.